Fur hunters in the mid-seventeen begin island-hopping along the Aleutian Islands, the crew of Vitus Bering having found valuable sea otters east of Kamchatka.

Furs are brought back to Okhotsk and carried inland, mostly to be sold to the Chinese at the Mongolian trading town of Kyakhta, which had been opened to Russian trade by the 1727 Treaty of Kyakhta.

By mid-century there are only thirty-seven peasant families and a number of Yakut cattlemen in Okhotsk.

There is so little pasture in the area that pack horses sometimes have to be returned to Yakutsk unloaded.